


Freedom of Thought

by DancerInTheShadows



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Academy Era, Bullying, Disability, Friendship, Gen, Loneliness, OC's - Freeform, The Deca - Freeform, Toxic friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-06-27
Packaged: 2020-09-27 16:36:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 35
Words: 18,643
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20410915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DancerInTheShadows/pseuds/DancerInTheShadows
Summary: There was a mistake with the Loom.There was a mistake with the Loom, and it left him... flawed. Defective. Imperfect.No Time Lord is ever imperfect.He lives, because Time Lords do not kill their own, but the Citadel does not look kindly on those who do not fit. And he will never, never fit.It might have been kinder to leave the Loom to incinerate him.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here we go! My first Doctor Who fic, and it's a weird one. Apologies if I got anything wrong in my portrayal of mental disability; I tried to base it off my own experiences with mild ADHD, but I don't know how realistic I was. Anyways, I hope you like it!

Theta is three years old when Brax finds out.

Up until that point, he’d been called unusually bright for three, a fine Time-Lord-in-the-making, approved of by the whole of the House of Lungbarrow. He never knew that anyone saw things any differently.

Until Brax, four years older than him but seeming more like forty, asks him to slow down, stop talking so fast, you’re not making any sense, Theta, so he puts his fingers to his older brother’s temples the way he’s seen the grown-ups do and  _ thinks _ at him, hard, and Brax staggers back like he’s been shocked.

Theta gets an impression of thoughts moving  _ way _ slower than his own, of laser-focus on a single topic, of a mind that moves in steady, orderly fashion all the time.

Brax, on the other hand, gets a confused flash of a hundred different trains of thought, an idea made up of startling, almost  _ nonsensical _ leaps in logic that nevertheless is far more brilliant than anything  _ he _ could ever come up with in the same amount of time, and most of all the sheer laughing  _ joy _ of living and breathing and understanding how the world works. 

Brax has touched minds before, out of curiosity or to learn or for communication, but he’s  _ never _ felt a mind like this. They’re all reflections of his own - calm, rational, methodical. 

He wonders, for a second, if there’s something non-standard about his little brother’s mind, dismisses it with the excuse that Theta’s still just a baby, and then the other child’s off again, three-year-old tongue tripping over the more complex words, and he’s back to trying to figure out  _ what _ , in the name of Rassilon, his brother’s doing. 


	2. Chapter 2

He is six years old when the adults find out.

His Cousin, annoyed at how he’s just  _ not paying attention _ , looking at little flying bug-things out the window or doodling complex fractal patterns on his tablet instead of taking notes on basic calculus like he should be, storms up to him and locks her mind to his. 

She jolts away in shock, staring down at his innocent blue eyes from her impressive height, then tells him to do some exercises in Learning Program Six-Delta-B. He’s figuring out the absurdly easy problems in his head when she runs out of the room. 

He’s hustled out of the Study Room by a pair of burly Cousins, into the Great Hall. He sits on a hard wooden bench and tinkers with a puzzle box, trying not to think about words like “neural abnormality” and “defective genes” and “shame to the House of Lungbarrow”.

It doesn’t help that, across the Hall, the grown-ups are shouting them at the tops of their lungs.

  
  



	3. Chapter 3

He is six-and-a-half years old when they take him to see a doctor.

Not just a medical technician, but a real Time Lord doctor, specializing in neurology and genetic disorders affecting the brain.

He sits in the soft, comfy lab chair while they scan his head and thinks about how he’d assemble his next project. He’d have to cannibalize the phase-shift meter and the old thermometer if he wanted the mercury - mercury, one of only two elements to be liquid at room temperature, worshipped on several planets, feared on several hundred more - maybe he can make do with alcohol instead - alcohol, ethanol, poisonous methanol brewed from the woody stalks of red grass, chemical formula CH3OH - Gallifreyans aren’t affected by alcohol like other species are, but the presence of gingerol and 6-shogaol - they use mercury as the name of a god on one small planet a long way from here - found mainly in ginger and neither of which are as hot as capsaicin, but capsaicin (and analogues (no two planets have identical biochemistry)) is only found on planets in the Milky Way - alcohol might actually be better for what he wants to do, if he can strip the flux capacitor of the restraining bolts and hook that up instead - 

They come in and unhook him from the machine and lead him to a blank white room where he sits, alone, and listens through the door to the doctor saying things like “the Army would be the best place for him” and “probably never be a Time Lord” and “neural defects this far progressed are uncorrectable” and “ should’ve been destroyed in the Loom, don’t know why he wasn’t, you might have to replace your entire House’s set, or at least get them looked at”.

Theta doesn’t say anything, just fiddles with the dismembered remains of his puzzle-box (he took it apart to build another, better one, but he left that one in his room, half-assembled) until the door opens and they lead him out, small and silent and hating everything. 


	4. Chapter 4

He is seven going on eight years old when he stands before the Council of Time Lords, smaller than usual in Brax’s old ceremonial robes that his brother outgrew last year, staring up at the gold-framed faces of the Prydonian chapter.

He answers their questions to the best of his ability, trying and failing to hide his anger and fear and sorrow when they ask him about the disorder. He says nothing that the doctors haven’t said, verbatim.

“Yes, sir, it’s a neurological disorder caused by a rare recessive gene on Chromosome Twenty-Seven, resulting in hyperconductive nerves, axons, and synapses, and the overproduction of neurotransmitters known to increase hyperactivity and overdevelopment of the nervous system. It is entirely incurable at this stage and little can be done to alleviate the symptoms.”

“No, sir, it doesn’t cause any exterior physical defects. The internal ones present offer no danger to my life or any others, although regeneration is much more likely to result in catastrophic consequences.” (That one gets him an angry mutter from the Time Lords in the gallery, at his presumption to mention regeneration like he thinks he’s entitled to it. He doesn’t back down.)

“No, sir, I can feel the timeflow. My Cousins test me regularly.

“No, sir, I am capable of telepathy.

“Yes, sir, it does cause inability to focus.”

They stare at him and whisper amongst themselves, a rustle like old dry grass in the neverending wind, and he stands there in the middle of the floor, fingers twitching behind his back, twisting the back of his gold-embroidered sash. They turn to look at him, faces framed by their old golden headdresses like rising suns, and the Chapter Head steps forward.

His Housemates hover in the background, whispering to each other, but they make no move to contradict the Chapter Head as he strides forward, to the sheer lip of the balcony. He stands, tall and imposing and incredibly ancient.

“The child will be allowed to face the Untempered Schism. Should he survive, he will be given  _ one chance _ , and one chance  _ only _ , at the Academy. Should he drop out, or otherwise fail, he will be terminated immediately. Should he succeed,” and his voice makes it very clear that not only is he expecting Theta to fail, he’s actively hoping he will, “his genetic information will be prevented from ever entering the Looms. The House of Lungbarrow has produced many exemplary members of our Chapter and of the Council. We can only hope that some of that has managed to seep into the child himself.”

He turns around with a dramatic swish and Theta has to stifle a laugh as two members of House Blyledge lean ever so slightly backwards to avoid his headdress. He doesn’t quite manage it, and it gets him a wave of cold looks that by rights should send him staggering to the floor. He refuses to back down.

“Dismissed,” the Chapter Head snaps, and they all file out, leaving him alone in the middle of the chamber, a spot, a smudge, a bloody red smear in the middle of the spotless white room, a cowering blemish among the towering, perfect majesty of Gallifrey. 


	5. Chapter 5

He is eight years old when they show up at the doors to Lungbarrow House, Time Lords in red and gold, guards in red and white.

His entire House is there, even Brax, dressed in the robe and collar of an Academy student, a Rassilonian Badge of Merit displayed proudly on his chest. He has gone from the solemn little boy that Theta knew for the first three years of his life to a solemn student, already well on his way to a prestigious life among the ranks of the Time Lord High Council. He does not speak to his brother, and his brother does not speak to him. 

He marches at the midst of the procession, down along the winding road from the mountains, and at every house they pass the Time Lords are there to watch them go. Children are rare on Gallifrey, and Time Lord children even more so. Even a defective one like him receives, if not the blessing of the others, then at least the acknowledgement.

He has never been the focus of this many eyes before, and he wants to run and hide, wriggle into the red grass and disappear, but he throws his shoulders back and holds his head high. He will not back down. 

The Untempered Schism lies at the heart of the plains, a great, swirling rift ringed in elaborate golden structures that rise above the horizon slowly as they walk. It is a long, long way there, and he wants to run, out along the dusty road, ahead of everyone else just so he can see what’ll come up over the edge of the world next a moment before the rest do.

But this, like everything else on Gallifrey, is full of ceremony and ritual. He will stand before the Schism at midnight exactly, and everything is measured to the nanosecond to make sure that happens.

He hates it.


	6. Chapter 6

He is eight years old when he stands before the Schism, but he feels so much younger than that.

As they crank the iris open, he clamps his eyes shut against the golden light that spills from between the many-layered petals of gold filigree, but eventually he has to open them, or face his lifelong disgrace. Braxiatel, with his over-cautious mind and hatred of anything out of the ordinary, stood here and stared into the Heart of the Vortex; if he did it, so can Theta.

_ Braxiatel is normal _ , whispers that little bit of his mind that’s been getting stronger with every passing day, but he ignores it and pries his eyes open.

For a second, all he sees is a golden swirl like palliam pollen and sunlight and atron energy all mixed up into one thing, like music made physical and starlight made touchable, like the racing, laughing flow of his thoughts drawn onto the air in living light, and then-

And then-

And then it is  _ so. Much. More. _

It is hatred and love and fear and rapture and joy and sorrow and the love of his life and his archnemesis and somehow both at once. It is a voice whispering  _ forever _ and a broken blue and gold star, a  _ hello sweetie _ and  _ hello, Grandfather _ and  _ hello, I’m the Doctor _ and just an impossibly suggestive  _ hello  _ that comes with a wrenching twist of the timelines and a faint memory of a golden-haired girl _ .  _ It is a star burning and a star birthing and a star living, a shout, a scream, a sob, an exultant whoop, an explosion from a hairspray can, a cheerful Scottish accent, the smell of acrid smoke, of city pollution, of  _ bananas _ of all things, a shout of  _ five rounds rapid _ . It is a flash of pink and plaid and yellow-checkered pants, the tumble of a cricket ball, a howling fall, the twisting song of the Medusa Cascade.

It is war.

It is planets burning and planets dying and the glitch-looping screams of a dying soldier, it is  _ exterminate, exterminate  _ chanted in soulless voices, it is  _ NO MORE _ burned into a stone wall, it is screaming voices and unraveling time, it is a hundred, a thousand, a million billion trillion Days and Years and Seconds That Never Were, an impossible endless loneliness, choking him in all the nothing.

It is beauty and destruction, creation and ugliness, music and magic and laughter and crying.

It is the Universe, and it is bigger than he can imagine and wilder than he can dream. 


	7. Chapter 7

He is eight years old when he runs away to see it all.

They catch him, of course, click their tongues over his actions, and he doesn’t have the words yet to tell them what he saw. His tongue is tangled in the middle of five billion languages; he’s babbling.

“A runner,” one of them murmurs.

“Better than a madman, and can you imagine what would happen if someone like  _ him _ was both?” snaps the Chapter Head. ”It’s for the best. The Academy’ll beat it out of him.”

The others all mutter at that, whisters of “hear what he’s saying? He’s mad, no doubt,” and “this was a terrible idea,” a hopeful “maybe he’ll die from the sensory overload” from the very back of the procession, and, rising over everything, the voice of one of his Cousins lamenting “how could this have happened?”

He’s towed back to the middle of the procession and they march back to the Capitol, over the red grass prairie. He stalls for a moment on the ridge overlooking the great domed city before they drag him on down the path and through the great golden gates and down the narrow streets of the city, all of the lesser castes bowing before them and clearing the streets in a heartsbeat. (Except for the shobogans, of course, who watch from shadows and doorways, whooping and whistling as the Time Lords ignore them.)

He stands before the great golden doors of the Academy where he will spend the next eighty or so years of his life, stamped with the Seal of Rassilon, and that is where they leave him as the doors yawn wide.

He wants  _ so much _ to look back, to search among the impassive faces for people he knows, for some remnant of his old life, but he can’t. So he steps forward, and the doors slam shut behind him.


	8. Chapter 8

He is eight years old when he enters the Academy to the stares of all the others. 

For the entirety of his life up to this point, his sole contact with others his own age has been Brax, who mostly just politely ignored him. His house had done the same after the secret came out. He’s used to wandering the halls of Lungbarrow House alone, spending hours in the gardens talking to the old hermit, sliding unnoticed past everyone, a ghost in the halls. 

Now, he is the focus of every eye, and every eye is judging him. He can feel the emotions washing over him; curiosity, pity, a mocking sort of interest… hope.

From one little corner of a balcony, way up high near the top of the atrium, hope. He turns to look, and it’s coming from one boy, about his own age, leaning casually on the railing like a proper Time Lord would never do. The boy offers him a lazy smile, wincing a little. He’s got a faint dark splodge on one cheek like the remnants of a bruise, twisting up and over his eye and cheekbones. He wiggles his fingers, languidly, and Theta snaps his eyes back to the front and the Time Lord in full ceremonial dress waiting for him at the end of the atrium. The boy chuckles, but his hope gets stronger even as every eye in the room snaps to him.

“Koschei!” the Time Lord calls, without looking. “You will remain silent, or you will be excused. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, Lord Borusa,” the boy - Koschei - calls.

Borusa harrumphs and turns to look at Theta.

“Theta Sigma, sir,” Theta says, looking him in the eye.

“Theta Sigma. Welcome to the Academy. Here, you will stand among the greatest in the Universe. Here, you will learn the secrets of time and space. Here, we will determine if you are a Time Lord in truth or a weakling not fit to live. This is the cradle of our civilization, the loom of the greatest species time has ever known, the heart of our world. You will be judged fit to take the oaths, or you will be eliminated. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes,  _ Lord Borusa _ .”

“Yes. Lord Borusa.” He does his best to inject his words with the faintest trace of sarcasm, enough to make it clear but not enough to get in trouble with. Borusa huffs, but says nothing. 

“Very good. Dismissed.”

Theta turns to leave, head up, shoulders back, ignoring the stares. 

“Theta Sigma!” Borusa’s voice cracks like a whip, and the rest of the room hisses, an indrawn breath multiplied a hundred times over. He stops but does not turn. “In regards to your… condition.”He says the word with palpable disgust, like he has to drag it out from the back of his throat with a taste like lixunas eggs gone off. The room hisses again, undeniable glee in the sound, and whispers break out in the highest galleries. Theta turns, meeting no one’s eyes, and stares Borusa in the face. “No special accommodations will be made for you, no second chances given. You will be expected to perform at the highest level, without fail. Should you be unable to maintain the level of skill necessary to become a Time Lord, you will no longer be welcome here. Do I make myself clear?”

Theta holds his breath for a moment, then exhales. “Very. Lord Borusa.”

“Good. You are dismissed.” He turns with a rustle of robes and shimmers into nothingness with a flare of blue light and a trickle of golden sparks. Okay, some kind of hidden teleport - maybe a transmat - probably a transmat, given the blue light - but TARDIS derived - where did he go? Off to teach a class? - was it hidden in the walls or on Borusa - would’ve been a transmat, since he couldn’t have gone out of the city - Borusa was headmaster, he wouldn’t be  _ teaching _ \- blue light, specifically a dark blue-violet, that was high-tech - but gold? - maybe he went to his office - the walls have a weird pattern - probably TARDIS-derived, if it was using artron energy - there could totally be power cables in the wall and a permanent transmat - people are whispering - people are staring - that wasn’t the right shade of gold for artron energy, too red - people are laughing - 

Something slams into his shoulder, hard enough to make him lurch forward a step. He spins on one foot, coming face to face with a smirking girl dressed in overly ornate robes. She nudges him again in the shoulder, hard enough to hurt. “Hey, freak! You having a seizure or something?”

“What? No! No, I’m - “

“Sure looked like a seizure to me, freak. You sure you’re not sparking out? Not gonna start screaming, are you? Or crying? One of my house’s a spark out:  _ we keep him locked in the basement. _ ”

“Yeah, freak, ‘s what they shoulda done with you!” shouts a voice from the back of the room, ground floor. “Locked you up as soon as they found out! Or better yet, killed you  _ and  _ your loom!”

“Lock him up! Lock him up!” voices start chanting from the middle balconies, a backbeat to the shouted insults and whoops and laughter as he staggers backwards, the sound like a physical force against his chest and shoulders.

He will not back down. He  _ will not back down _ .

“ _ ENOUGH! _ ” roars a voice from behind him. A familiar voice, accompanied by a telepathic message strong enough to smother everything else in the room. “We are  _ Time Lords _ ! We do not shout and catcall and laugh like shobogans! You will comport yourselves with dignity, or I will report you all to Lord Borusa.”

Theta spins to see Braxiatel, in a student’s full ceremonial dress, collar and all, standing alone on a balcony at the very head of the room, just above where Borusa was standing. The room fills with soft resentment, shame, and a sort of grudging respect, the last whispers fading. His brother’s voice bounces off the cold stone-and-metal walls, ringing sharply.

“The High Council has given Theta Sigma leave to attend the Academy. He will be given the same chances as the rest of you, no more and no less. He is still a member of the House of Lungbarrow, a Patrician like the rest of us, and you will treat him as such.”

Theta stares up at his brother, but his brother doesn’t look down at him. Ignores him. Stands tall with his hands behind his back and his voice cracking sharply against the closed doors and the walls. 

“Remember your position,” Braxiatel finishes, and turns to leave with a dramatic swish of robes. Theta watches his brother go.

He will make a good Time Lord.


	9. Chapter 9

He is nine years old when he makes his first and only friend. 

He’s spent a year in the Academy, struggling to pay attention in the classes about basic engineering and physics and math, forcing his mind to focus on the lectures instead of on what the other students are wearing or the architecture of the rooms (it’s a fascinating combination of the different styles of all the Chapters, and each room is slightly different, built at a different time by a different Time Lord (the construction of this place is incredibly old and fascinatingly complex))) or the people passing below, going about their daily lives at the bases of the great spires. 

It hurts. 

He’s spent a year sleeping alone in a room that is supposed to be shared, and his stuff sprawls all over the place. It was enough to get him yelled at on a weekly basis by whoever was doing inspections, until they all seemed to mutually decide that it was caused by his… condition ( he doesn’t call it by the scientific name, or by the names that the others use (defect, sickness, abnormality)). Now they just sniff and move on.

It hurts.

He’s spent a year ignoring the whispers that follow him around like snakes, the cold glances and the deliberate turning of backs and the way that no one comes anywhere near him if he can help it. He’s learned to catalogue escape routes, read the mood of the room in a glance, slide between people without looking at their faces, hide in a crowd. He’s learned to walk tall in the face of insults, accept the way the professors always use him as an example of what  _ not  _ to do, never accept that he can’t do something, no matter how hard it is.

It still hurts.

And then…

Two of the others have a fight, a massive blowout in the middle of an all-school assembly, something that devolves into  _ fisticuffs _ , of all things. It’s an older boy, one of the wealthiest students in the school, and the small boy who  _ hoped _ when Theta arrived. 

Koschei. 

Koschei threw the first punch, his signet ring catching the other boy’s cheek and spattering blood all over the both of them. The other boy, of course, retaliates with a kick, and it just gets worse from there. Borusa actually has to call in a pair of guards to separate the two, and they don’t stop screaming insults at each other.

“Plant-lover!”

“Freak!”

“Renegade!”

“Spark-out!”

_ That  _ gets a reaction. Koschei bites his guard in the hand,  _ hard _ , and launches himself bodily at the other, clawing at his face. “Take it back!  _ Take it back _ !”

Everyone lurches back a step. The only actual spark-out any of them have ever seen never says anything when they call him that, just sets his shoulders and keeps walking. Theta should know. 

He shoves his way through the crowd, forcing himself through the ring of older students to drag Koschei away, hands clamped down over his wrists. Their eyes meet, and then the guards catch the other boy around the middle and get a staser against his neck. The other boy drops, limply, and the guards drag him away. 

Braxiatel catches Theta by the arm and pulls him away, over to a quiet corner. For once, no one’s eyes are on them. 

“What was that?”

“I just… nothing. It’s nothing.”

Brax watches him for a while, then huffs. “Good. Make sure it stays that way. You can’t be seen fighting.”

Theta wrenches his arm away and stalks off to his next class. 

When he gets back to his room in the evening, all of his stuff, his clothes, projects, books, homework,  _ everything _ , has been dumped in a haphazard pile on his bed. Where it used to be is now taken up by someone else’s stuff, even more battered and beat up than his own. Koschei is flopped on the other bed with an old paper book, definitely some kind of priceless family heirloom, over his face. He sits up as Theta comes in and snaps at him to close the door.

Theta deliberately leaves it open. (The hallway’s empty; most people have already requested a transfer away from him.)

Koschei huffs. “They dumped me in here with you, in case you were wondering.” Theta was, but he’d already figured that out. The other boy was Koschei’s roommate; they’d gotten into fights before (well, Koschei got into fights with everyone), but it’d never ended physically before. He’d probably gotten dumped in here by Borusa as some kind of twisted punishment for his reaction to being called a spark-out.

He doesn’t say anything. 

Koschei watches him for a while, then drops the book back over his face and ignores him. Theta sorts through the stuff on his bed, enough to at least clear it off, then settles down at his desk and pulls out his notes. 

Which aren’t there. He hadn’t been able to pay any attention at all in any of his classes today. It’s just page after page of nonsensical ramblings and doodles and little reminders. His notes from history are a set of surprisingly detailed schematics for a device that uses sound waves to perform a variety of functions. His notes from mathematical theory are a close-up drawing of a flutterwing eye. His notes from the Chapter Agenda class simply don’t exist at all. 

Koschei drifts up behind him, breathing down his neck. Theta shifts irritably, but ignores it, just closes the reader and tries to remember what they’d talked about, what the homework was, anything related to the classes at all.

His traitorous brain refuses to cooperate, rambling off on three separate tangents. He wants to slam his head into things in a desperate attempt to get things working right, he wants everything to be normal, he wants that little voice in the back of his head chanting  _ freak freak freak freak  _ to shut up-

Koschei drops a notekeeper on his head. 

By the time he picks it up, the other boy’s back on the bed, actually reading this time, but his dark eyes glint at Theta from over the top of the book. 

The notekeeper is full of writing, in a dark, heavy, nearly illegible hand, but from what he can make out, it’s all the stuff he missed, subjects and homework and even test dates.

Koschei is still staring at him over the top of his book, only barely pretending to read, and Theta smiles at him.

He hasn’t smiled in a long time. 


	10. Chapter 10

He is ten years old when things start to finally go right in his life.

Koschei is harsh and prickly and has a hell of a temper, but he’ll do anything, including letting Theta cheat off his homework after he spaces out in class. Theta, in turn, keeps him from blowing up at people, and teaches him how to work the complicated mathematics that come as easy as breathing to him but are apparently a struggle for everyone else. 

Koschei, not being as much of a social outcast as Theta is, brings in others, people willing to at least tolerate a freak. Ten people from their year, who all reach the tops of their classes with his help (when he can focus enough to give it to them). They plot together, build plans and dreams and hopes for the future ahead of them, (thousands and thousands of years), name themselves the Deca and vow that they’ll be as famous as Rassilon, someday. Ranidelaxsamorai wants to be the best genetic engineer in the history of Gallifrey, and if her side projects are anything to go by, she’ll succeed. Drax wants to design TARDISes, build models like nothing the world has ever seen before, leagues beyond the current type-60’s. Koschei wants power, wants to be acclaimed like no one else, worshipped and revered. (His words leave a bad taste behind them, but Theta ignores it. Koschei is his friend, his only friend.)

Theta just wants to be accepted. 

He doesn’t get anything in return, of course. Even if the others are willing to let a freak help them with their math homework, they’re certainly not going to give that same freak something that might make him better than they are. Koschei’s the only one who helps him at all.

It’s only thanks to him that Theta manages to stay in the Academy, as his ... condition gets worse and worse. He eventually learns to just take it in stride, stare out the window and let his mind wander, because then it’ll be far more likely that he actually retains some of this instead of forcing himself to listen and just having his mind be wiped blank after class. Somehow he manages to learn the higher levels of calculus, memorizes the complex dimensional equations, figures out, all on his own, how to use those to make his pockets and his bags bigger on the inside. When they cover gravity, he learns how to manipulate weight no matter the internal or external dimensions, and ends up carting around what has to amount to several dozen kilos of unnecessary junk with him all over the place.

It comes in handy, sometimes, like when the internal transmats break and he uses a piece from one of his old puzzle-boxes, fiber-optic cables from a broken constellation-lamp, and gold melted down from one of his ceremonial collars to fix them  _ and  _ make them twice as efficient.

He gets a lecture, anyways, about messing with Academy property, how he’s only here on sufferance. One more incident along these lines will get you expelled, yada yada yada, so he builds a teleport in his room out of spare parts from Mechanical Engineering and uses it to leave the Capitol behind and go running in the wild grass on the slopes below Lungbarrow house. 

He takes Koschei with him, sometimes, when the narrow hallways become too suffocating, and they learn all the ins and outs of the mountains and the plains and the river that runs in the valley, the massive palliam forest that backs Oakdown House, with secret streams tinged teal and green from copper deposits in the mountains. Two boys, one fair, one dark, racing each other through the red grass, shouting to the suns in the burnt orange sky and daring the shadows of the clouds to catch them. 


	11. Chapter 11

He is fifty years old when everything starts to go wrong. 

His… condition has been steadily worsening over time, blanking out his brain, throwing his focus out the window, sparking along his nerves so his hands shake and he has to use a cane at the tender age of fifty-three. The ceremonial robes of velvet and gold are by turns too hot and too cold, the collar off-balancing his neck so he sways from side to side while wearing it until he learns to clench his jaw and  _ keep _ it still by force of will.

Braxiatel, in a display of uncommon kindness, shows up one morning to drag him to a doctor in the middle of the Capitol, midway up one of the huge spires. There’s a window all along one wall of the waiting room, showing a view of the great city, with just a faint blur of white and grey in the background that has to be the mountains. The windowless Academy, with its rigorously tended gardens and silent order, is nothing like the bustling city he can just barely see from up here. 

There are people down there, dressed in Chapter colors and technician's robes and the sumptuous fabrics of merchants. They almost brush shoulders, they’re so close. It’s like a river, a river of many, many colors, that splits apart to let a Time Lord through then flows seamlessly back together. 

There’s so much  _ life _ , here, all jumbled up and interconnecting, an entire world outside the confines of the Academy-

Braxiatel clears his throat,  _ loudly _ . Theta spins around with a snap of his robes (and the bones of his neck (even his bones are weakening now, his muscles almost strong enough to snap them with a motion)), overactive nerves firing off with a jolt. The Time Lord standing next to his brother is wearing Prydonian colors, but informal robes; they’re rumpled and a little stained. _Eccentric_, then, but the glitter behind his eyes belies intelligence. He isn’t wearing a collar or skullcap (his outer robe doesn’t even have a flared collar to represent the rising suns).

“So. This is the boy, then.”

Theta draws himself up to his full height (which isn’t actually all that tall). He is an Academy student of a prestigious Chapter and a prestigious House, he does  _ not _ deserve to be called boy.

The Time Lord sniffs. “No need to get in a huff, boy. I’m seven thousand years old. Everyone’s ‘boy’ to me. What’s the problem, hmm?”

Theta says nothing. Braxiatel sighs, apologizes, and pulls the doctor away through another door while Theta stands in the middle of the clean white waiting room, shaking. 

The doctor runs tests and things, mutters to himself a bit, and then declares that there’s nothing that can be done. If he’s granted regenerations, then some of the problems can be fixed, there are shots that will take away some of the symptoms (without fixing the condition itself) but for this life? Nothing. 

This condition will kill him.

When he gets back, Koschei is pacing the confines of their room. He says nothing as Theta comes in, just glares at the floor like it killed his Kithriarch.

Theta leaves him be. He’s been getting like this more and more often, lately, and trying to snap him out of it more often than not results in a screaming match that gets both of them hauled to Borusa’s office for another lecture.

He flops down on his bed and hauls out his latest project, ignoring the steady beat of Koschei’s footsteps and the seething roil of hatred that fills the room like poison gas.


	12. Chapter 12

He is sixty-seven years old when it really starts getting bad.

Koschei’s been getting worse, lately, snapping at him for imagined slights, picking fights with the other students, disappearing for days on end. He runs off into Low Town, once, and Theta has to come running at his telepathic distress call with an improvised teleporter that yanks them both out to the forest behind Oakdown House, where they promptly have a fight that ends with Koschei bleeding from a scratch over his eye and Theta concussed. Koschei manages to rewire the teleport beacon to get them back to their rooms, then packs up all his stuff and leaves.

He shows up in class the next day, same as ever, slips into place next to Theta at the lab station and whispers “I’m staying at my House’s spire.”

Theta says nothing, just blinks past the fuzziness and tries to concentrate on filling a beaker with the right amount of solution. The numbers are blurring, back and forth and bigger and smaller and bigger again, and the world’s tipping a little.

Koschei looks at him with (false) concern, and leans in to hiss “You all right?” into his ear. 

Theta nods, but that just makes him sway more. “I have to be. If they think I can’t handle this, I’ll never be a Time Lord.”

“You look really sick, is all.”

“I’m fine. Kos, I’m _ fine _. I’ve got a free period after this, I’ll… go take a nap, or something.”

“You two!” the professor snaps from the front of the room, where he’s intoning the chemical formula for batrachotoxin (permanently opens voltage-gated sodium channels in multiple life-forms across the galaxy, dangerous to a Gallifreyan but survivable, especially by a Time Lord) and how to internally synthesize the chemical antidote. Or, well, he _ was _. “Is there something the matter?”

“No, sir,” Theta mutters, but he’s drowned out by Koschei.

“I think Theta Sigma isn’t feeling very well, sir. He’s been having dizzy spells.”

“Shut up!” Theta hisses, but Koschei ignores him with that smug smile that’s recently replaced his old one. 

“Theta Sigma!” the professor snaps, and if everybody in the room hadn’t already been looking at them, they sure are now. Everyone wants to see the freak get it.

“I’m fine, sir. I swear. I can keep working.”

The professor’s voice is dangerously calm. “If you are incapable of maintaining full concentration, you should not be in lab. I would recommend going to the infirmary.”

“I promise, sir, I’m fine. I can stay.” He moves to set down the beaker full of batrachotoxin, but Koschei jostles him and he has a moment to think that his friend was too far away for that to be accidental, he would’ve had to reach a good distance (a foot and a half, at least) to bump his arm in that exact manner before it shatters on the floor, spilling deadly poison all over the marble, soaking into the hem of his scarlet robes.

The room flashes into activity, students slamming the regular drains shut and opening the biohazard channels, flooding the floor of the room with water as those closest to the spill make an ungainly hop up onto the lab stations. Theta wants to laugh at the sight of Gallifrey’s finest perched on the narrow counters, robes hitched up, collars dangerously close to falling off, trying to avoid tipping over other beakers, but the swirl of red and gold as other students pin their hems up and haul on protective boots to come splashing through the rivers of water on the floor just makes him dizzy, dizzy enough to want to barf, so he closes his eyes as someone slashes through the back of his soiled robe and hauls him firmly backwards.

He staggers in his undertunic and trousers, the only parts of him that didn’t get the poison on him. Koschei has the back of his tunic collar in his hand, dragging him across the floor roughly as the water streams past his feet, murmuring solicitously in his ear. One of the Deca members, Ima Salix, is holding the emergency vibra-blade in one hand and the destroyed remnants of his robes in the other. Theta stretches for his cane, leaning unobtrusively against the side of his workstation, but the movement unbalances him and he sits down, hard, with a splash, soaking himself all the way through to his undermost layer.

After the hustle and bustle of emergency procedures, the dead quiet that follows is even more stifling. 

“Theta Sigma!” the professor roars into the silence, voice ringing of the high ceiling. “Infirmary. Now.”

“Sir-”

“Now! And don’t let me see you in this room again!”

“Yes, Lord Emillin.”

Silently, smirking, Koschei pulls off his cloak and hands it to him. He hauls it around himself and stalks off, wet boots squishing and splashing in the draining water.


	13. Chapter 13

He is sixty-seven years old when someone finally fights for him.

The infirmary is just as dead quiet as the lab had been, but has a forlorn emptiness to it, a ringing echo and a stale scent. There is a single, redheaded medical technician sitting at the back end of the room, with a long view down the twin rows of beds to the teleporter dais at the other end of the room. She looks up at him with a tired expression, evidently expecting a bored student trying to skip class.

She was very clearly  _ not _ expecting a soaking wet student wrapped in a robe that clearly isn’t his own (it’s much too long, dragging on the floor, and the patterns don’t match with his underclothes at  _ all _ ), bloodless pale and swaying on his feet. She comes rushing down the aisle to support him to the nearest bed, where he flops more than sits down.

“What happened?” she asks, kindly, darting around the bed and powering up the diagnostic machines with a thought, carefully attaching the electrodes to his neck and head. The scanner immediately goes off with a flashing alarm, blue light intermixed with yellow and just a tinge of mauve, and he flinches away from the sound and the colors.

The medtech knows what she’s doing, apparently, because she shuts the alarm off as soon as he flinches away and goes on attaching the electrodes. They hum unpleasantly against his skin.

“What happened?” she asks again, facing him. He can’t really focus on her face or her mind. It keeps slipping out of focus, blurring away and darting in the other direction when he tries to get a hold on it. 

“Fell,” he mumbles incoherently. “Hit my head yesterday, think I got a concussion. Can’t think.”

Another alarm goes off, this one registering not abnormal brain activity but internal malformations, organs in the wrong place, hearts beating too fast, cells aging at a rapid rate as telomeres break down. She shuts that one off too.

“Concussion?”

“Yes,” he whispers, closing his eyes and falling back onto the bed. She catches him by the shoulder and lowers him, gently, so he doesn’t jostle his already aching head.

“Can you tell me about the physiological and mental defects present? Because those aren’t caused by concussion.”

“Check my file. Theta Sigma. It’s all there.”

She stays at his bedside for a moment, then leaves. The electrodes’ buzzing increases and he reaches up to rip them off, fingers twitching from the influx of electricity. She notices, he can tell, but she doesn’t do anything. It’s a long, long while before she walks back over to him. 

“I’m sorry. I’m going to give you a sedative, okay? To help with the headache.”

He says nothing, and doesn’t even move at the first pinch of the needle in his arm. The world goes away for a little while. When he wakes, she’s sitting in a chair next to him, reading, but she looks up as he moves.

“I’m sorry for what they did to you,” she says. “No one deserves that.”

He doesn’t answer.

“I know they said that if your condition ever impacted your learning, you’d be expelled-” That’s new. He’s never heard that before (he isn’t surprised, though). “But this wasn’t caused by your condition, just exacerbated by it, and I’m going to tell them so.” She’s radiating righteous anger and determination. Why would she do that? He’s nothing to her. He’s less than nothing, a defective scion of an Oldblood House, a family secret and a family shame. He’s probably not even good enough for the army, not as an officer. 

“I’m going to fight for you. You don’t deserve to be expelled for something you have no control over.”

What? Why would she - what kind of agenda - who’s paying her - his House? No, they don’t want him to graduate - Koschei? Why would Koschei - maybe she wants something from him - he’s just a student, what could he give her - power? A formal place if he graduates?  _ What? _

She scoffs. “Stupid pompous Time Lords. You don’t even think that I’m doing this because I’m trying to be kind. No, there always has to be some ulterior motive, some kind of reward for you to even think about doing something good for something else. It’s no lost regeneration if I tell them you got yourself a concussion falling down some stairs somewhere, and if it’ll keep at least one Time Lord who doesn’t pay as much attention to the rules as he should in the Council, then so much the better. Now, official diagnosis is concussion, official treatment recommendation is bed rest for at least a day and removal of all strenuous activity for a week. You have my permission to skip class if you feel you need to; I’ll write you a note. Clear? Yes? Good.”

She flips her long red hair over one shoulder and spins away, white and blue medtech’s gown swirling around her feet. 

“Why?”

“What?” She flips back around with an energy that reminds him of himself on a good day.

“Why me? Why help me?” He drags himself up to a sitting position, gripping the raised rails on either side of the bed. 

She stares at him, then sighs. “Because you don’t deserve to be kicked out over something you have no control over. Because you’re one of the kinder ones here. Because you try, even though you can’t always make it. Because I don’t want the Time Lords to screw anyone else over. Because you’re just a kid. Because it’s the decent thing to do. There, is that reason enough? Yes? Good. Now, I’ll send you back to your room. You can listen to audio, but no telepathic signals for the rest of the week. Come back in a week for a follow up. Got it? Good.” She slaps her hand on a large blue button on the side of her desk, and in a flare of blue light, he’s back in his room.

When he goes back for the follow-up, it’s a different medtech, another female with blonde hair caught up in a severe bun. She doesn’t speak to him.


	14. Chapter 14

He is eighty years old when everything turns on its head. 

Koschei has been spending the last ten years splitting his time between his family’s Capitol spire and his room in the Academy. Borusa knows about it, of course, but Oakdown House is powerful and Koschei is a decent student, so everyone just looks the other way. 

Braxiatel had graduated four years earlier, with a place in the Higher Academy waiting for him. He’ll end up in some high-ranking position on the Council in a hundred years' time, the darling of his House, and he’ll spend his thousands of years of life here, on Gallifrey, walking the corridors of the Citadel spires and performing the trivial business of the Council. Maybe he’ll get married, but probably not; he’ll be placed high enough that their Kithriarch wouldn’t dream of an arranged political marriage, and it doesn’t seem like Braxiatel could ever fall in love. 

As the great red-and-gold doors swung open to release him from the Academy for the final time, he stalked out without a word, collar catching the light of the rising suns as he strode above the streets of the city on the Great Bridge of Rassilon, leaving his adolescence behind and joining the adult Time Lords, who waited in a semi-circle with the Lord President at the center. 

They converged around him, the ends of the crescent swinging in, and then they all walked away in a mob, rigidly sectioned by Chapter.

Theta, watching from the high balcony at the top of the Academy spire, leaned heavily on the railing and seethed at his brother. 

Now he and Koschei are graduating, the only two students from their year. The Rani (Ranidelaxsamorai chose a title that was unnervingly close to that of a renegade (a move more like something Koschei (she's always wanted to be more of the rebel (just like Koschei) would pull)) has already left. Drax dropped out ten years ago. Ima Salix won’t leave for another five years. 

They stride, side by side, out the yawning doors and into the Capitol. The streets below and the public balconies on the surrounding spires are packed with people, dressed in the clothes of all Chapters and all castes, all of them staring up at the Great Bridge of Rassilon, blazing golden in the rising suns. 

The Council is waiting for them as they walk, and surrounds them as soon as they cross the bridge, putting on a show for everyone else. But the minute, no, the  _ second _ the great doors of the Panopticon swing shut behind them, the Council splits into Chapters, and the Chapters into Houses, who pull Theta and Koschei apart. 

Koschei is busy being scolded by his Kithriarch, berated for sullying his house by associating with… with a deformed  _ freak _ . Theta just gets looked at, judged, and deemed wanting. He’s hustled away from the rest of them, and no matter how he stretches to see, Koschei gets lost in the crowd. 

They take a teleporter back to Lungbarrow House. The old House, buried in the side of the mountain, looks… old. And dusty. And like its been forgotten. There’s no conversation coming from the parlor, no electrical humming from the lab, no gentle conversation coming from the servants in the kitchen. The Looms haven’t been run since Theta was created, for fear of producing another defect, and without children here to necessitate cousins and servants and  _ people _ , the House lies still and silent and  _ dead _ . 

He wanders between the rooms like a ghost, dressed in faded crimson while others whisper from behind closed doors. His old, childish puzzle boxes sit, still, on the shelves in his room, batteries long run down, the flickering lights that once covered their faces dead and dusty. 

The House fills up over the next few days as the members of House Lungbarrow return to celebrate the entrance of another time Lord into their ranks. 

There isn’t much celebrating done. They haven’t prepared a position for him in their ranks; none of them thought he’d make it. Everyone (and he means  _ everyone _ , even Brax) thought he’d flunk out and end up some low-ranking officer in the army, going to the ceremonies and watching the useless ritual drills and generally trying to find a way to live with the crushing boredom of thousands of years of nothing.

It’s enough to make him want to melt down his collar, steal a land-skimmer, and head for the other continent. But that’s only a passing fancy. He’s a Time Lord, not some savage living in a hole in the ground.

Well, technically, Lungbarrow House is in the ground, but it doesn’t quite count as a hole, he thinks. What does count as a hole? Anything underground - is a cave in the side of a mountain a hole if it never goes down? - does a hole have to be open to the air? - but then it would be a hole in the side of something - does it have to be bare of furnishings? - but does that really count as a hole in the ground when everyone thinks of it as a cave - do doors and walls and bedrooms and things make a hole not a hole - there are caves buried deep under the ground that have never seen the light, do those count, or are they more… bubbles in Gallifrey’s crust - what if life got stuck down there - Lungbarrow House definitely isn’t a hole, holes are circular - what if life got caught in one of those bubble-caves, would it evolve completely separately from everywhere else-

One of his Cousins clears his throat, loudly, and Theta snaps back to reality.

“It’s time for the Ceremony.”


	15. Chapter 15

He is eighty years old when he becomes a Time Lord.

The Ceremony (of Rassilon, no doubt, but he’s never  _ actually  _ heard it called that) is stuffy and pompous and exactly what he expected. He and Koschei stand in front of the High Council in the Chamber (of Rassilon) as the President makes a long and  _ very  _ dull speech about the honor of being granted the Imprimatur (of Rassilon) and how they are expected to uphold the honor and the majesty of Gallifrey, how they will now be permitted to enter the Higher Academy (of Rassilon) to learn the science of time and space and the secrets of the Time Lords (of Rassilon), yada yada yada.

He already knows half of this, but the Higher Academy is really just a place for the Council to determine where to stick you. If they like you, you get a cushy job in one of the high spires. If they don’t, you get stuck down in Low Town or worse, out in the prairies, outside the protective dome of the Capitol. 

The President’s speech winds down and everyone claps, softly and politely, before gathering around him and Koschei in the ceremonial escort. One of Koschei’s cousins deliberately inserts himself between the two of them, glaring at Theta.

Theta huffs and sends a flicker of disdain along a private telepathic link to Koschei, who leans forward to grin at him over his Cousin’s shoulder as they walk. He’s excited (a dark excitement, more like bloodlust, but Theta ignores it), practically bouncing along as he walks. 

The pack of Time Lords disgorges them into a massive white room, floor made of a forcefield suspending them above a huge golden iris that is mirrored on the ceiling. They take up places in alcoves along the outer rim of the room, and Theta and Koschei walk, side by side, to the single patch of solid floor, a circle of glass suspended in the center of the room.

Servants come sliding through hidden doors in the walls to take their collars and outer robes, leaving them standing there in undergowns of thin, fine cloth, the hems fluttering in the breeze that comes from nowhere.

The servants disappear and the sourceless illumination fades, until the only light in the room comes from along the edges of the iris panels. The glowing gaps widen, widen, widen, until the room is entirely gold, the light dividing into swirls of sunlit motes.

He breathes, deeply, and it floods into his lungs, singing through the alveolar cells and into his blood, darting into his heart and up the nerves that connect it to his brain, sparking from axon to axon, synapse to synapse, jolting down his spine to the rest of his body. The shock of it forces him to his knees as it sings through him, blinding him with golden light…

And then it’s over.

Koschei is still standing, glaring at the Time Lords like they killed his pet flutterwing or something. The House of Oakdown members are radiating smug pride, while his own Cousins stare at him with contempt as he struggles back to his feet.

Their glares are a force to be reckoned with, but he will not back down.


	16. Chapter 16

He is eighty-one years old when they finally admit him to the Higher Academy.

There’d been a massive fuss over his actions in the Chamber of the Imprimatur of Rassilon, of the way he had fallen to his knees like no  _ proper _ Time Lord would, of the way the artron energy singing through his veins had left him shaking and unable to function for a full day afterwards. Somehow or other,  _ someone _ had forced the Council to accept that his frail nervous system, affected by his … condition, had been unable to handle the rapid influx of artron energy, that it had nothing to do with his fitness to be a Time Lord, given a low-level job with little to no temporal interference. So long as he’s never given a TARDIS or a job that requires him to leave Gallifrey, he should be perfectly capable of performing his duties.

He likes to think that he saw a flash of red hair and the swirl of a blue and white medtech’s gown disappearing down a corridor when they called him in to explain this to him. 

He thinks, not for the first time, that he never got her name. (That brings up flickers from the Untempered Schism, a future where a woman died to save his life and he never knew her name, but it fades almost before he can remember it.)

Finally,  _ finally _ , Brax, as the sole member of his House in the Higher Academy, comes to the door of Lungbarrow house in a Council skimmer to escort him to the great golden spire in the Capitol. The guard driving it stares at him sideways the entire way, trying to get a glimpse of the oddity. Theta doesn’t let any of his emotions show on his face, just stares dead ahead like the rest of the world is beneath his notice. 

The Higher Academy itself, despite being much more vertical than his previous experience of schooling (six rooms to a level, with a gravity shaft down the center), is just the same. The same sideways stares, the same whispers, the same students congregating in his room dreaming of bigger things while he stares through his holographic skylight at the transduction barriers above him and dreams of the Universe.


	17. Chapter 17

He is eighty-five years old when he meets his first TARDIS. 

The Higher Academy is less focused on the scientific basics of Gallifrey and more exclusively focused on temporal manipulation, anything from the principles behind De-Mat Guns to time travel to probability manipulation.

(He steals datacubes from the library on how to twist the probabilities to suit him and practices in the dead of night, reweaving the golden threads of time to fit his vision of what the Universe should be. He likes the power it gives him, likes the way he can shape anything to suit him. It saves his life in lab, once, when Koschei very nearly shoots him with a reconstructed staser, but he manages to twist the world enough that the shot misses and slams into the wall instead, shorting out all the lights. It gets him a lecture on responsible use of his abilities and a reluctant commendation from Borusa, followed by confiscation of all his stolen datacubes and a ban from lab for the next year.

Koschei just laughs and doesn’t apologize for nearly killing him.)

His entire school decade troops into the TARDIS garage, filled with models from every era, from an inert replica of the very first model, TT Capsule Type-1, to a brand new prototype TT Capsule Type-78, with a dispatch from the Chancellery Guard to make sure that clumsy students don’t damage the gleaming controls and shining machinery.

They all hum at the edges of his senses as he wanders among the rows, from the boxy Type-64 to the sleek silvery oblong of the Type-76, disinterested in him and everything to do with him, content to watch from afar. They are alien, more alien than anything he’s ever experienced, yet even standing next to a TARDIS with the Vortex in their heart feels like coming home. 

The instructor watches him warily as he wanders, alone, separate from the group. Even Koschei is standing near Ranidelaxsamorai as she inspects the Type-1 replica, brushing her fingers over the blank white interior and asking one of the assistant instructors something about early dimensional engineering. 

Music.

Music echoes through his heart and soul and the artron energy still snapping along his nerves, music like he’s never heard before, and it feels like… love.

It feels like love. 

He stalks through the rows with a purpose, brushing through the cordon of Chancellery Guards around the Type-78, slipping around the pair of Type-70’s, and there she is. Singing to him.

It’s an old, nearly obsolete Type-40, something that should’ve been torn apart for scrap  _ aeons _ ago, but here it is, standing in the guise of one of the crystal pillars common to the eastern Houses.

Singing to him. 

The Guard is mobilizing as the instructor comes striding through the rows, robes flaring dramatically behind him. 

Theta tugs off one of his gloves and presses his bare palm to the surface of the TARDIS. Her music sweeps through him, and a sense of familiarity, like she’s known him for her entire life. (He cannot say why she feels female to him, but she is, and he knows this like he knows the rhythm of his own heartbeat.) Deep blue washes out from where his palm is pressed against her side, flaring out across the sides as she stretches towards her true form-

The instructor slaps his hand away from her, knocking him backwards into one of the Guards, who catches him, careful not to even come near his ungloved hand. The blue fades, rapidly, dissolving back into the green crystal as the doors swing open and a truly ancient Time Lord steps out. Her music becomes a lament, a wail that dies away as she returns to her inert state.

The instructor places himself in the Time Lord’s way as the guard scoops up Theta’s glove and hustles him away from the TARDIS, shoving him along as the instructor begins to apologize profusely. Theta can feel the elder Time Lord’s regard on his back, curious, before his disappears back inside and dematerializes with a sound like something’s seriously wrong with the brakes on his ancient timeship.

The guard calmly escorts him up to Borusa’s office, where he stands in his accustomed place as Borusa chews him out, reminds him again that the Council has  _ not _ given him permission to meddle around with practical temporal manipulation  _ or _ travel, and dismisses him to his rooms. 


	18. Chapter 18

He is ninety years old when he leaves Gallifrey for the first time.

After that one time looking at the TARDISes five years ago, his entire school decade hasn’t been near the things since. According to Brax in a surreptitious note slipped under doorways, this is normal for all classes. They get one look at TARDISes, then five years of introductory classes on the theory behind dimensional engineering, Vortex physics, and the basic rules of time travel (don’t interfere, don’t mess up the natural flow of the timelines, restrict time travel to Council-approved safe spots, do not make yourself known to the lesser races, et cetera, et cetera ad nauseam) before they’re even allowed to go inside the things.

When the field trip is announced, the entire school is in an uproar about it. Borusa chooses a new destination every year, and its location is only known to him and the six Time Lords who will be piloting the TARDIS. Older students are raving about their trips to look at the gas clouds of the Helmrach system, or the supernova of the secondary star in Binary System Assal-Delta-7.

Even with their uninspired descriptions, the wonders beyond Gallifrey sound wonderful, beautiful,  _ alive. _ Far more so than dusty old Time Lords, striding around the upside-down glass bowl of their Citadel on the plains. 

When the day comes and all of the students file down the spiral staircase, tugging on cloaks and outergloves and tall protective boots because  _ anything _ that isn’t inside a spire is  _ outside _ , even the sterile white interior of a TARDIS, Theta is overwhelmed in the crush until Koschei grabs him by the arm and tugs hm along to the waiting TARDIS, in the guise of a skimmer with the ramp down and loading bay doors wide open.

They all file on one at a time, into a sterile white control room with the hexagonal console in the very center, staffed by six Time Lords with multiple technicians wandering around, politely directing students through the door at the back of the room to the waiting gallery. Theta hovers, then tugs his arm from Koschei’s grasp and slips behind a pillar, staring out at the Time Lords waiting in their stations.

They all move in perfect synchronicity when the doors close, flipping switches and pulling levers and relaying information telepathically around the circle as the TARDIS sings and flies away.

She dances through the Vortex like a flutterwing on the temporal breeze that sometimes crosses the plains, making the palliam trees rattle in the wind and their silver leaves flash in the sunlight, and she sings to her pilots of the wonders of the Vortex as it swirls and swirls and swirls…

They’re there, and Koschei is tugging at his wrist, hard, hissing in his ear. “Theta, come on! If they find out we’re not in the waiting gallery when they arrive, they’re going to get mad, and I’m going to get in trouble!  _ We’re  _ going to get in trouble.”

“We’ve already arrived.”

“What?”

Theta blinks. Didn’t he hear it? The song, the  _ music _ , the flight across time and space to who  _ knew  _ where?

“What?” he asks again, and Theta realizes that he just broadcasted that telepathically. “Theta, what’re you talking about? I didn’t hear anything.”

The pilots are already looking at them, and Theta internally cringes, tugging his wrist free from Koschei’s grip and moving to walk into the waiting gallery. Everyone there is looking at him with that knowing smirk on all of their faces, like they know exactly what’s going on.

Bousa stops him.

“Theta Sigma!”

He freezes in place, back stiff and straight, cane planted firmly on the ground.

Borusa sighs. “If you and Koschei are so impatient to see the Universe that you can’t even leave the control room of a TARDIS in flight, I suppose there’s no help for it but to let you two see what you’ve apparently been so desperately hoping for. Come here.”

He turns around, trying to keep the desperate hope off his face, and Borusa flicks the door lever. A section of wall swings open wide to reveal…

He doesn’t have the words to describe it. 

It’s a bit like the Untempered Schism, if a bit less brain-breaking, and it’s beautiful. 

It is  _ beautiful _ . 

Soft gasps come from the others as the ceiling of the waiting gallery flows into something clear and tough, but Theta doesn’t look back, staring at the blazing swirl through the faint shimmer of the outer edges of the oxygen field.

It sings to him, like the TARDIS but older and wiser and more familiar, somehow, a strain of music that resonates inside his chest and between his ears.

It’s a bit of his name, he realizes, planted there in the gap between worlds and realms and Universes, a lacy-edged hole in the warp and weft of spacetime, a rift between times that sings…

Of  _ him _ . 

His name is embedded in this half-real place, words and emotions and the peculiar strand of time that is  _ who he is _ , strung through time itself, from his personal future.

Sometime in the future, he will weave himself into the fabric of spacetime enough that his name will become an integral part of this Universe, holding the fabric of reality together.

A memory bubbles up in golden light like the Schism, of an unreality caused by his half-death and half-life, the same nauseating loop of time repeating over and over and over again, his life a fixed point supporting… well, supporting everything, until his time-strand, despite being woven over and under and back again on itself like a piece of fine cloth, gives and tears and reality begins to fall.

That regeneration is particularly prone to timey-wimeyness, he thinks, in a bursting bubble of a premonition that fades as soon as it came, leaving him wondering what he was thinking about. 

The light captures his attention again, even as Borusa begins to talk behind him, something about a Cascade and an unusual space-time formation and how it seems to be reacting to the presence of a TARDIS-

One of the pilots shouts something and the doors slam shut. With the flip of a lever, the translucent ceiling in the viewing gallery slams back to opaque and the doors fade away. Somehow, the control room has shifted to the very center of the TARDIS, right next to the Eye that powers her. He can feel the pulses from here. With a wrench, the TARDIS is fleeing through the vortex, and Theta reaches out for the beauty instinctively, pulling for that sense of belonging, that remembering-knowing-being of what he will be, sometime in his personal future. He strains for it, stretches, feeling the pull against his body as his mind struggles to overcome the weaknesses of the flesh-

Something cracks against his face, and he blinks awake in shock to Borusa holding his overglove gingerly between two fingertips. The palm is stained with something bright reddish-orange - blood? 

Theta touches the wetness just now present on his face, and his fingertips come away smeared with the same substance. He staggers back a step, cane forgotten on the floor in front of him, and the TARDIS materializes in the Academy infirmary. He is hustled out the recreated doors into the capable hands of the blonde med-tech who replaced the red-haired one. She hauls him over to a bed and knocks him out with an electrode to his temple. 

The TARDIS dematerializes before he’s completely under, leaving him alone with the singing loneliness under his skin.


	19. Chapter 19

He is ninety years old when he comes back to class with a hastily set and plastered broken nose.

Koschei, instead of letting him fade into the background like Theta so desperately wants to, comes up from his seat at the very front of the class to solicitously help him up the aisle, asking him (loudly) if he’s okay, if his nose is going to heal, if he’s experiencing any lasting side-effects from the seizure he’d had on the TARDIS-

Theta cuts him off a little to loudly for propriety, but he doesn’t care. He’s too tired to deal with all the myriad etiquette rules of Time Lord society, and anyways, Koschei is looking a little too triumphant to make him entirely comfortable.

He doesn't speak for the rest of the week, trying to fade into the distance and be forgotten, but every time he does, Koschei is there, being loud and noticeable and drawing altogether too much attention to him, until he can’t stand it anymore and he takes a swing at the other boy. The hurt, betrayed look on Koschei’s face, though, immediately makes him regret it and he lurches forward to apologize even as Koschei disappears into blue light. 

Koschei doesn’t come back for days, and Theta has to deal with the stares and the smug whispers and the disapproving looks of the masters alone. Even the Deca barely speak to him outside of their sessions in the library, trying to figure out six-dimensional trigonometry and how to engineer it using probability threads and the endless power source of the Vortex, or how to loop it through time to some moment of energy and use that. Theta gets it easily; they don’t.

They hate him for it, just a little bit.

Oh, they’re all so very good at hiding it, but they hate him for it.

Even with that, he will not back down.

Koschei returns and it’s just like it was before, Theta dependent on him for companionship and passing his classes, Koschei picking his brain for the answers to his homework and the tests. The abrupt normality of it is dizzying, but Theta ignores it. He has to. He would be entirely unable to manage without Koschei, and if Koschei wants to pretend that everything’s fine, everything’s fine. The others will hate him, that’s okay. The masters will pity him, that’s okay. He’ll despise himself, that’s okay. It’s fine.

The days pass, and the weeks, and the months and the years and everything’s fine.

Maybe if he says it enough, it will be true. Or he’ll believe it, and isn’t that just the same thing, in the end?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello, all! It is November again, which means that I will be participating in NaNoWriMo. Since most of my creative energy will be going towards that project, there probably won't be a new update until the end of November. This story _will_ eventually be completed, though.


	20. Chapter 20

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welp, I said I was going to be focusing on NaNoWriMo, but did my brain listen? Nope! So here you go, have another chapter.

He is ninety years old when he is banned from touching a TARDIS ever again.

“Too unstable for time travel,” they tell him, and “dangerous reaction to a harmless space-time anomaly,” and “TT-capsule reacted abnormally to him during the flight back”. 

He wants to scream at them that that was  _ his name _ , there in the stars, his timeline, woven through the Universe like golden brocade, that he was born to travel through time. He is a  _ Time Lord _ , by Rassilon, and this is his birthright.

He stays silent.

They ban him from the classes that teach students exactly how to operate a TARDIS, but he manages to successfully argue for staying in the Academy. Koschei grins at him when he leaves the Audience chamber, but Theta ignores him.

He didn’t even know he’d been hoping to get a TARDIS someday, but now that it’s not even possible, all his hopes of getting away from this planet, away from the cold marble and bloody robes and sidelong glances of the Time Lords are gone. Vanished.

He will die here, a dozen times over, and he will never, never leave.

Koschei takes one look at his face after that and leaves him alone for the rest of the week.


	21. Chapter 21

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so, like actual last chapter until the end of November.

He is a hundred and eighteen years old when the Council comes to the Higher Academy. 

There is a member in every chamber, staring impassively over the ranks of student working diligently at lab tables, or the discussion circles that now, more than ever, are filled with nothing but the same old ideas, repeated endlessly around and around and around (it makes him dizzy half the time - he never speaks much over a normal day, but he’s practically mute here), or the silent workrooms where students sit in their little cliques, bent over datacubes and holodisplays.

The Council never so much as looks at him. He drifts to the shadows even more, slipping out from underneath their gaze. Koschei, on the other hand, parades himself around, head held high, loud and authoritative in his discussions with the Deca, just different enough in his actions and his opinions to bring all eyes on him for pretty much the entirety of the discussions. 

The Council hates him, of course. Not only is he so…  _ flamboyant _ , so very clearly  _ not _ a perfect Time Lord like all the others, he’s connected with  _ Theta Sigma _ , the spark-out. The one who has seizures at the drop of a hat, who can’t remember half the several thousand Rules of Conduct (of Rassilon), who can’t even follow a simple discussion.

Theta begs him to leave, to spend time with the Deca, not with him. Even despite his actions, it’s mainly the other boy’s association with him that will bring the wrath of the Council down on his head. Koschei just laughs and flops down next to him with a datacube, talking loudly (incessantly) of where they’re going to go once he gets a TARDIS of his own. 

The Council makes their recommendations to Borusa in front of the entire Academy, a silent telepathic communication, shielded from all others, despite every student on the balconies straining every passive sense they’ve got to find some trickle of information.

Borusa thanks them gravely, and the Council leaves, sweeping out the great golden double doors, the light of the rising suns through the dome catching off their headdresses and reflecting up into the students' eyes.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! Apologies about the long wait for a new update; it's been hard to get back in the mindset I need for this piece after so much time during November spent writing something entirely different.

He is one hundred and twenty years old when he’s given his final placement.

It’s a  _ very _ slow process, even for Time Lords, and he is one of the first to leave the Academy for his new placement. Some of the others, like Ranidelaxsamorai will be waiting for decades, possibly more, as Council members fight over where they want such potentially important political pieces.

He, however, is just wanted somewhere  _ out of the way _ .

He gets stuffed into a position so near ground-level on the Capitol as to not matter at all, overseeing the technicians who maintain the dome’s structural integrity.

The dome’s materials were designed by Rassilon, the structure itself constructed by another Time Lord from the founding of the Capitol. In all the millennia upon millennia of the reign of the Time Lords, it has never so much as gotten a smear on the crystalline exterior. The technicians are really just there to get them out of the way.

Same with their Time Lord supervisor.

He’s been given a monitor implant, something to, ostensibly, keep track of the progress of his condition and make sure he doesn’t need medical intervention where no one could help him. It’s really just to keep tabs on him - where he goes, what he does, who he talks to. It gives a warning beep every time he tries to make small talk with the bored technicians, so he ends up standing, for hours, in the observation bubble at the base of the dome, staring wistfully out over the prairies and up into the mountains, dreaming of the times when Koschei was still young and kind and they ran together through the red grass and howled up at the golden sky. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so here's the thing; I both have a shitload of stuff going on in my personal life right now, _and_ writers block on this story. I'm trying to keep it moving, I know where I want to go with this, but I've hit a point where I just don't know how to fill in the gap between where I am and where I want to be. (That sounded way more melodramatic than I wanted it to be, but that's just how I talk, I guess:) )  
So! Updates are probably going to be much more infrequent than they were, but I do really want to finish this piece. Thanks for sticking with me.


	23. Chapter 23

He is a hundred and eighty years old when Braxiatel and his Kithriarch show up in his workplace.

The technicians all jolt up from their screens when the door alarm sounds, scrambling to look busy before whoever’s going to be coming in. Theta doesn’t move from his spot lounging by the observation bubble, leaning against the smear-proof, scratch-proof, fog-proof dome. Over sixty years, he’s cultivated a reputation for being lazily complacent, willing to accept the most menial of tasks if it means he doesn’t have to do much of anything at all. It keep him out of the eye of the Council, and in the (relatively) good graces of his house. The freak is safely contained and out of the way, and it’s willing to stay that way. 

It hurts. It burns at him, slowly, this boredom. It eats away at his heart and mind as he sits here, day in, day out, looking out at the red grass that he remembers so vividly, and the changing colors of the sky, orange and golden and flame, the valleys in the mountains that once rang with voices screaming just to see how loud they could be and are now silent but for the wind.

Braxiatel steps in with all the pomp of a Council member, headdress catching the low-angle light from the bubble and reflecting it straight into Theta’s eyes, more sensitive now than they were during his academy days. Behind him is House Lungbarrow’s Kithriarch, cold and silent in robes like blood.

The technicians are dismissed with a telepathic signal, one that stabs at the space behind his eyes and sends them scurrying out the entryway as the door seals behind them. 

Theta lurches to his feet, meeting Brax’s eyes solidly, planting his feet on the ground and thumping his cane down in front of him. (It’s a traditional pose from many off-world Gallifreyan-form cultures that had a cultural period with long blades being used as weapons of some sort (it invokes memories of children’s tales of brave warriors holding the pass against insurmountable odds (despite the fact that Time Lords haven’t been warriors for millennia upon millennia upon millennia, it still holds some resonance) willing to fight to the death for life and love and all those other emotions that Time Lords have forgotten (emotions, Theta feels sometimes, that only he remembers) here in their unbreakable dome.))

(It also makes him significantly more stable.)

Brax doesn’t move, simply looks him in the eye and tells him he’s getting married.

_ That _ , (despite the stance) makes him reel, staggering a step backwards as the shock crackles along his spine and makes the nerves jolt with electricity. Brax makes no move to help him as he stumbles, grabbing for a nearby technician’s station to stabilize himself. His Kithriarch looks on in disgust.

“To  _ who _ ?” he manages to get out of numb lips.

“Whom,” Braxiatel corrects calmly. “Delavrainesalixlanansora. I believe you know her Cousin, Ima Salix?”

Ima Salix, of the Deca. The closest thing he’s got to a friend. (Aside from Koschei, but who can tell how much of a friend Koshei is these days?) He’s getting married to her cousin.

He’s  _ getting married to her cousin _ .

“Why?”

“Her House has many projects that could be useful to us. They requested an alliance, and we assented. This seemed the easiest way to accomplish it.”

In other words, House Salix begged House Lungbarrow for help, and House Lungbarrow decided to rope them in through marriage. A form of shelter, yes, being tied to the biggest house of the Prydonian Chapter was an undeniable step up, but House Salix would be in Lungbarrow’s power until both Theta and Delavrainesalixlanansora died. 

And to pick  _ him _ was an insult, plain and simple.

The Kithriarch stares at him, and Theta realizes that he’s waiting for him to say something. 

He clears his throat. “Right.” What can he possibly say? “When is it?”

“So you accept the proposal?” Brax asks, looking at him. He’s hiding his emotions well, but something’s slipping out from behind his shield, something a little bit wistful and a little bit reflective and a little bit sorrowful.

What else can he do? Theta nods, sharp and decisive. His Kithriarch huffs, slightly, and speaks for the first time. “Good. The ceremony will be held sometime next year. You will be informed as to the date once it is decided.”

So he’s not going to have  _ any _ say in this, his own wedding. His Kithriarch spins on his heel and marches out, robes flaring behind him, golden trim catching the light of the setting little sun. 

Brax lingers, looking out over the plains, silent as the mountains and looking twice as old. Theta stands beside him, and for a moment, they’re brothers again, just like they were before they went to the Academy, surveying the view from Brax’s room.

“For what it’s worth,” Brax begins, and falls silent. Theta just waits.

“For what it’s worth, I’m sorry,” he says, and it has both the ring of truth to it and the sense that he doesn’t know what else to say. Theta smiles, bitter, without looking at him, and says nothing.

Brax leaves soon after.

Ima Salix comes in after Brax leaves, lounging in the doorway. He doesn’t look at her.

“So,” she says.

He doesn’t answer.

She sighs. “Dela’s my Cousin. Just... “ she trails off and sighs again.

He calls up Dome specs without looking at her, the holographic display reflecting off the observation bubble’s sides. Ima Salix leaves soon after that, and the technicians file back in without saying a word.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've got a [Tumblr](%E2%80%9Cicedragondreams.tumblr.com%E2%80%9D) now! There's not a whole lot there yet, but still. Come say hi?


	24. Chapter 24

He is a hundred and eighty two years old when he gets married.

There is none of the ceremony of a love match. This is a business arrangement, plain and simple, nothing more. The Kithriarches of House Lungbarrow and House Salix stand on a balcony facing the dome and talk together, while he and Delavrainesalixlanansora stand together, just behind them. She doesn’t look at him, and her mind is hidden.

They both place their telepathic imprints into the datacube recording the ceremony, and that’s it. That’s all. It’s done.

He’s married. 

They both go back to her rooms, in her family’s spire (ostensibly they’re bigger, but really it’s just a power move by House Lungbarrow (give the smaller house the freak to take care of (make sure they know their place))). She does have a lovely balcony, with an excellent view of the mountains and the rising suns. He spends most of the first day there, watching the clouds race each other across the sky, picking out shapes from the curling whiteness.

They don’t speak, that first day. Not one word. Ima Salix comes to visit, and speaks to her Cousin quietly for a while before leaving. She gives Theta a smile as she goes, but nothing more. 

Members of both their Houses are in and out all that week. Most of them just want to talk to Dela. Brax goes so far as to stand on the Balcony with Theta for a while, but leaves without saying hardly anything.

The real surprise is when Koschei shows up. He’s loud and laughing, slapping Theta on the shoulders and making raucous and slightly dirty jokes about married life. He lights up the silent rooms in a way that Theta hasn’t seen since their early days at the Academy together, and even Dela smiles. For a moment, Theta can pretend that everything’s going to be okay, that Koschei’s still his best friend, that this is no different from anything else.

And then Koschei’s Kithriarch shows up to drag him away and Dela stops smiling and retreats into her sitting-room. The apartment goes back to being white and quiet and cold, and Theta goes back out on the balcony.

The clouds this time look like they’re racing away from him, like the world of his childhood is deliberately leaving him behind. He wants to chase after them, beg them not to leave him, scream to half-forgotten gods to take him away from here, but they’re just clouds.

Just a last, fading dream, vanishing in the sun.


	25. Chapter 25

He is a hundred and ninety-one years old when his first younger Cousin is created.

House Lungbarrow hasn’t run the Looms for two centuries because of him. Not a single new patrician, not a single new Time Lord or technician or house servant has been born, all because of the fear that they’d turn out like him. His Loom was destroyed soon after his Kithriarch found out, and the rest of them have been checked and rechecked and completely overhauled before being tested and tested again.

And now, finally, is the final test run, and Theta, like all the members of his House, is invited to see them step out of the Loom. He stands in the gallery, watching as the artron energy slowly stops spinning inside the graceful oblong of the gestation chamber and the petals fold back, going glass-clear as they curl back in on themselves, and they step forward, onto the smooth marble of the Looming Chamber.

This new Cousin has been accelerated to full growth while in the Loom, so that they can be safely and legally destroyed if any flaw is found.

There is no flaw.

They do not wobble on their feet the way Theta does, and he can feel no flickering sparks of unstable mental contact snapping from their mind, they way he’s been told he feels. They are tall, and pale, and a raw tumbledown mane of copper hair falls past their shoulders. They are everything a Time lord should be, perfect and proud in the center of the welcoming Cousins.

Theta wants.

Oh, he  _ wants. _

He wants to  _ be _ them, wants to be standing there in the middle of his House, wants to be accepted by more people than just Koschei and Brax (but only sometimes does his brother even acknowledge his existence), wants to sit on the council and have his ideas listened to, wants to go to a set of rooms at the top of Lungbarrow Spire instead of being forced to stay in House Salix’s smaller, shabbier quarters with a wife he doesn’t love, who’s just a little (more than a little) afraid of him, wants to have academy friends the way Brax does, the way the Rani and Ima Salix and Drax and Lunavethrasalilai and Dennaculendevreia and all the rest of the Deca (and pretty much everyone else at the Academy) has, instead of just Koschei (who loves him and hates him and clings to him like he thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t and Theta clings back because he’s  _ sure _ that if he ever lets go of Koschei he really will just die).

He wants to be normal.

Dear Rassilon, Omega and Other, noble Founders and Old Gods of Gallifrey, he wants to be  _ normal _ .

He hates the Time Lords and everything they did to him because if he didn’t… well. He doesn’t know what he’d do, but he’s pretty sure it’d be long and painful and bring shame eternal upon his House. 

The new Cousin has been clothed now, in robes of red and gold brocade, hair caught up underneath a proper headdress and looking the perfect Time Lord, and he just can’t take it anymore, this consuming envy, this desperate  _ wanting _ .

He turns to leave, shoving his way between two House members, but the newborn Cousin lifts their voice imperiously. “You there! Where are you going?”

He doesn’t answer.

The new Cousin, trained in the Loom and already adept at telepathy, reaches out, in case Theta didn’t hear.

Theta knows what’s coming.

The new Cousin, unnamed, presses past the outer layer of his shields, runs up against the spitting sparks and shining traces of though; contained, sedate order pressing up against raw chaos and recoiling in pain. The new Cousin cries out, and Theta runs.

Flat out, like he used to do on the plains with Koschei, away from the raw loathing and terror and pain, the censure of his House and the hatred that even a newborn Time Lord, lauded for their innocence just because they stepped out of the Loom fifteen minutes ago, can’t help but feel. 

Theta runs and runs and runs and briefly contemplates never stopping.


	26. Chapter 26

He is a hundred and ninety-nine years old when House Salix finally decrees that they wish to consummate the marriage.

A child will be loomed on the Lungbarrow House looms, with mixed genetic information from both House Lungbarrow and House Salix, and given to House Salix to raise and train. It will be, symbolically at least, his child, although he doubts that he will even even interact with it beyond the Looming ceremony, and he  _ certainly _ won’t have any genetic input.

It’s an  _ ancient _ tradition, from before Looms, before Time Lords, before even Rassilon, and it’s rarely even used anymore, except in situations like these, a political play by an underdog house to get more power. House Salix will get prestige from having the genetic code from such a prestigious source, and House Lungbarrow can’t very well say no because they were the ones who agreed to the marriage in the first place. To say no now would be a blow to their reputation.

Rassilon forbid a Time Lord ever lose their reputation. 

He is, of course, invited to the Looming ceremony (as one of the “parents” he has to be (it would be a terrible breach of tradition otherwise)), and he places the drop of his blood in the scanner (as required) (the scanner is powered off, of course, it’d be a terrible tragedy if another Time Lord were to be born with his… condition), stands next to Dela (as required), watches as the Loom (already prepped with genetic material from both Houses, so that no trace of his flawed code can make its way into the next generation) is started up, and files out of the Looming room with the rest of both Houses to take his place at the head of the table for the feast (as required). 

They are celebrated with one heart sitting silent by House Lungbarrow, and with both hearts and mind by House Salix, and neither House is hiding their relief that Theta had nothing to do with the whole thing. 

Theta, of course, just sits there, focusing on his nearly-untouched food (he’s never hungry anymore, not since the physical defects began to  _ really _ manifest) and tries to pretend that things will be the same after this.

They won’t be, of course, but there’s nothing he can do about that. The blood-red tide of the Time Lords has dragged him along in its wake for his entire life; he doesn’t see himself getting out of it anytime soon. 

The most he can do is not fight back, let it carry him, and try not to hit any rocks on the way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is my attempt to blend the theories that say Susan's his natural granddaughter and that say she's... something else. Does it work? Hell if I know. You tell me.


	27. Chapter 27

He is two hundred years old exactly when the child is born, in a Looming ceremony exactly like the one he attended sixty-three years ago. 

_ Exactly _ . Down to the time the new Cousin reaches out to him in wide-eyed wonderment, flinches back and away at the strangeness of his mind, and his desperate flight back to his rooms in Salix Spire, where he sits on the balcony and stares at the mountains and dreams about running away.

Dela finds him there, doesn’t say anything, just sets a glass of something in the air by his elbow (too close to his elbow - he’ll knock it over when he tries to move - he’s too clumsy to do much of anything now - he needs to find a solution - part of the problem is that the levdisc in the base is statically placed - he can’t do much besides stand around and look at things - and only supported from the base - he’ll end up with stuff all over his robes again - so it’s capable of being knocked over - the static part is the problem - he can’t even handle the ceremonial headdresses now - if he could get rid of that, so it could just move through the air when it got bumped - his neck and shoulders are too weak to hold up the gold - add a proximity sensor so it moves  _ before _ he touches it - his spine would fracture from the weight of it --)

He twists away from the cup, moving carefully so he doesn’t so much as brush it and goes inside. Thinking like that just leaves him disappointed, because he can never _ , never,  _ do what he wants to and his thoughts always turn right around and leave him standing there missing the days when he was young, when he could sneak around the Academy with Koschei and create the things he saw in his mind, when he had the freedom to just  _ do _ stuff.

He used to think that getting away from the Academy would be better, that he’d have the time and the lack of supervision to do whatever he wanted. 

How wrong he was.

Now he just stands around and stares out of windows and doesn’t talk to people, dreams about things but never does them, and watches his world and his body calcify around him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the erratic schedule, second-year IB is kicking my ASS.


	28. Chapter 28

He is two hundred and eight years old when the child, a young boy with golden-blond hair and sleepy brown eyes, goes to see the Untempered Schism.

As the child’s “parent”, he stands in pride of place in the procession, just off the boy’s left shoulder, while Dela stands just off his right, and they walk the whole long way through the red prairies, on the road paved with flat hexagonal stones. He struggles with the weight of his headdress, even with the gravity manipulator he’s woven into the gold. He leans more and more heavily on his cane the further they go, stumbling over the slightest change in incline.

Both Houses give him pitying looks, and whisper to each other telepathically, just loud enough to overhear.

_ Perhaps one of his cousins should take over his position. I’m sure House Salix wouldn’t mind. _

_ He looks like he’s about to fall over. Think we could get away with leaving him behind if he does? _

_ Maybe that would be for the best. Then we’d have an out.  _

_ Why was he even allowed out of the Loom if this was going to happen? He should’ve just died. _

_ He should’ve just died. _

_ He should’ve just died. _

Maybe he should’ve. He certainly  _ wants _ to. He wants to just curl up in the red grass and let the world leave him behind.

He wants to just give up. Give in. They always said he would come to nothing, in the end. Why not make that come true, right here, right now?

Because he can’t. He couldn’t. Because he’s never given up before and he’s not going to start giving up now.

So he settles his headdress more firmly onto his shoulders, plants his cane between paving stones so it won’t slip, and keeps walking. 

He won’t back down. No matter what happens, he won’t back down. He made that choice a long time ago.

He won’t back down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys, sorry I haven't updated in a while. But hey, now that I'm under quarantine, there should be updates coming a bit more frequently!  
Also: I've made edits back to chapter 25 regarding ages: they've been dropped back about a hundred years or so as of this chapter. Just wanted to put that out there so people know what's up if they feel it's inconsistent.


	29. Chapter 29

He is two hundred and eight years old when his son goes to the Academy. 

He stands with him as the great golden doors swing open and his son walks through without a backwards glance, caught up in the memory of his own time at the Academy. He hasn’t thought about Koschei in a long time, hasn’t seen him for  _ years _ , because every time he does, every time he slips back to that time, he just wants to-

That is not something that bears thinking about. Not here, not now, not when Borusa is nodding to him from the great window above the doors, not when his whole house is celebrating.

When they all return to House Salix for the celebrations, he slips away into a corner and settles there, running his fingers over the warm golden edge of his headdress, dreaming absentmindedly of golden skies and golden suns, and the curling, laughing twist of his name in the Medusa Cascade.


	30. Chapter 30

He is two hundred and twelve years old when  _ she  _ is born.

House Lungbarrow, eager to make up for two centuries worth of self-imposed barrenness, has been running the Looms far more frequently than usual (he and Brax were anomalies, only three years apart, it’s one of the many secrets he’s heard whispered behind his back (why he’s defective, why he’s a freak, why he’s a spark-out)).

He stands at the ceremony, mental shields augmented by technology woven into his headdress, put there by Brax (at the order of his Kithriarch) to prevent a repeat of the last two incidents. ( _ We can’t have the young of our house mentally scarred just after they’re born _ , says the voice of his Kithriarch,  _ so you will wear the shields, or you will remain in the Capitol _ . He can no longer breathe in Dela’s quarters, locked away in the computing-ozone-stink of his bank of technicians, trapped behind a blister of glass, looking out on a world he used to think was his, so he says yes, and lets them wind the wires around his forehead and down his neck,  lets the pain lance like lightning up and down his spine, all for permission to leave the Capitol, all for the chance to breathe again.)

The child steps out of the Loom in a swirl of gold. She is small, slender, not a child as he was but not quite an adult either, half-grown, and she smiles at the House all full of laughter and dances a swirling step to where her -  _ their _ \- Kithriarch is waiting with the ceremonial robes of red and gold.

She reminds him of  _ him _ , when he was young. Now he is white-haired and wrinkled, aged beyond his time by his  _ condition _ , trapped in a failing body. 

At the feast, she smiles at everyone, but stares down the table at him, obviously wondering why someone so old, someone who should obviously be respected and venerated, is sitting at the foot of the table, in the place of least honor. He doesn’t meet her gaze, but although their Kithriarch speaks sharply to her, he feels the weight of her gaze returning time and again until he stands, abruptly, tipping back his chair with his clumsy, uncoordinated movements, and flees her, her and all the rest. 


	31. Chapter 31

He is two hundred and sixteen years old when she calls him  _ Grandfather _ .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)


	32. Chapter 32

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait!

He is two hundred and twenty years old when she goes to the Untempered Schism.

She goes to the Untempered Schism, and she comes back and sits in his parlor in Dela’s quarters and calls him  _ Grandfather _ there, and he calls her  _ Arkytior _ , the white flower that blooms only in the harshest soil, called  _ liananta _ in a world where they sky is never dark, and  _ rose _ in a world where the people dream of gods and monsters and the Doctor.   
_ Arkytior;  _ for love .

They have sat here many times before, while she tells him stories of people from other worlds and he tells her stories of him and Koschei, of the pranks they pulled and the places they went and the worlds they dreamed of when they were barely ninety.

Neither House Lungbarrow nor House Salix likes her coming there, but she is a perfect little Time Lord child, unflawed (unlike him), and there is nothing they can do when she slips out of the Lungbarrow Spire and sneaks into his quarters to surprise him on the balcony.

She calls him  _ Grandfather _ , an old term, but fond, full of respect and love and a dozen other things he’s half-certain no other Time Lord on all of Gallifrey understands besides him and his Arkytior. She calls him  _ Grandfather _ when she comes back from the Untempered Schism, with a light in her eyes and a song woven through her thoughts, and she tells him that she dreams, someday, of a TARDIS and a world of billions of people all living and dreaming and laughing and dying and a little isle where people talk with funny accents. 

He smiles at her, and lets her tell him, walks her to the door and waves goodbye when Dela (still young, younger than he is, young and beautiful and so, so sad (he wants to make her smile but he doesn’t know how (well, not beyond releasing her from this  sham and shackle of a marriage, but House Lungbarrow would never allow that))) comes in to tell her that her House is worried about her, that she must go home now. 

She laughs and smiles as the lift doors close, and Dela turns accusing eyes on him, but he merely shrugs and goes out on his balcony. 

She calls him  _ Grandfather. _


	33. Chapter 33

He is two hundred and twenty-two years old when he sees her cry.

She comes back to him the first time they let her out of the Academy to see her family (he never left on those trips - his family never wanted him with them, ever, and walking alone through cold golden halls was the closest thing he got to peace for a lot time - before he met Koschei - he hasn’t had peace for a long time) and she runs at him hard enough to knock him back a step, hard enough that she has to reach out and stabilize him, babbling apologies through numbed lips until he rests his hands on her head like a benediction.

She cries into his robes, then, into the thick velvety material that he’s worn for  _ ages _ because of this exact reason (no-one knows you’re crying if the evidence gets wiped away before it can truly show), and he wraps his arms around her slender shoulders and shushes her like the wind through the palliam trees.

She cries until she’s worn through, and he gets Dela to come and place her in the great plush chair in the main room. And yet, when he asks her what’s wrong, what happened, what he can do, she shakes her head and asks him to tell her a story.

He does, because he can think of nothing else to do.

It takes another year and a bit, another double-dozen stories and soiled robes discreetly placed in the cleanser to wash out the salt-stains, for him to see what has caused his Arkytior to wilt so, and it nearly kills him with rage.

They call her spark-out’s daughter.

They call her body-born, blood-born, unLoomed.

They call her  _ freak _ .

The rage of it crackles along his frail nerves, sends the delicate synapses into his brain into a roaring maelstrom of telepathic  _ fury _ , rushing-hot as novae.

It sends him into cardiac arrest.

One of his hearts stopped, the medtech tells him (he wishes for a moment that she was red-haired and fiercely protective (sometimes he thinks he dreamed her (please let her be real,  _ please _ , let there be some scrap of kindness on this world))), he almost didn’t survive.

He hurt the youths from the Academy telepathically, the Council tells him, when he is recovered and called before them, standing small and bloody-red in the middle of the great white room. He nearly injured one of them permanently, and never mind that they insulted his granddaughter, his perfect Arkytior, never mind that he nearly killed  _ himself _ , no, he must be punished for the telepathic equivalent of a scraped knee.

Still, there is nothing he can do, so he meets the eyes of the Chapter Head and accepts his punishment.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three years of writing this, and we've finally finished. :)  
The entire story is currently written and done, I'll post chapters every few days until they're all up here.


	34. Chapter 34

He is two hundred and thirty-one years old when Koschei comes to see him for the last time.

The other Time Lord (he's no longer a boy, hasn’t been for a long time) looks different. Thinner. Meaner.  _ Older _ . He laughs in Theta’s face when he asks him what’s wrong, and it’s so different from his laugh in the fields behind Oakdown house that it hurts, sharp,  like a knife between his hearts.

His laugh has grown bitter and cold and manic, no more mirth in it, no joy, no simple pleasure in being with a friend. There is only age and pain and the way that Gallifrey crushes  _ everything _ that isn’t exactly what it wants.

It crushed Koschei, it crushed Theta, and it will  render his Arkytior into dust .

Still, Theta welcomes him into his rooms, asks Dela to give them some privacy (she does, though he can feel the cloud of sorrow she leaves behind her), and settles onto the balcony, looking out over the spires and streets that are all he’s ever known.

“I’m leaving,” says Koschei. 

Theta doesn’t look at him. He’s known this was coming, ever since they were boys, but it still hurts to hear, to know that the one bright thing in his life will be leaving him behind.

Again.

“Come with me,” says Koschei, only it’s not a question, not a request, it’s a  _ command _ , and he knows that if he goes with him there will only ever  _ be _ commands.

“I can’t,” he says, because it’s true.

“Why not?” Koschei asks, shifting to face him properly. “ _ Come with me _ , Theta. We can… leave, leave  _ all of this _ . Take a TARDIS, run away, not have to worry about Councils or Academies or what our Houses think. We can just… _go._ We can _leave._ ”

“I can’t.” Because he  _ can’t _ . Because he doesn’t know how to leave all of this behind. Because he’s too scared of what he might become if he leaves Gallifrey, if he becomes a Time Lord among the lesser races, those who have no knowledge what power lies behind all the pomp and circumstance of their world. Because he’s too scared of what Koschei has become. What Koschei might make  _ him _ become.

Because he has a granddaughter now.

He has a granddaughter now, and they call her spark-out’s daughter, and he should leave her be, should let her become a perfect Time Lady untainted by his presence, but she is  _ so. Much. More. _ than any of them could ever hope to be, and he cannot, he  _ cannot, _ let her go. 

But for all his intelligence, for all the skill with time and space and  _ possibility _ that lies behind his fragile skull, he cannot weave that into words, cannot look his best friend in all that ever was or will be in the Universe in the eyes and tell him that.

So he says “I can’t” and begs Koschei, silently, with all his heart but none of his voice, to leave him lie. 

Koschei stares at him, and he can feel the rage growing like the lightning storms that sweep the deserts to the south, like the crackle and pulse of power that sparks stars to life. He wants to beg, beg him to understand, beg him to back down, but he has never been able to.  Not once, in all of his years, has he  _ begged _ .

And so he faces the storm, as always, and doesn’t flinch when Koschei cracks a hand across his face, hard enough to break the thin cartilage of his nose, hard enough to send blood gushing down his face and over his lips and into the plush softness of his favorite robe, hard enough to stun his nerves and rattle his brain and send him crumpling to the ground. 

Inside, Dela screams.

There is chaos, after that, medtechs and guards and Lungbarrow House members everywhere. He is helped to his bed and plied with water and medicine, asked politely but firmly what Koschei talked to him about, why he would strike at him so, why a time Lord would hurt another so, but Koschei is his friend.

After  _ all _ of this, Koschei is still his friend.

So he shakes his head and feigns confusion and when word of a stolen TARDIS makes its way back to him he sighs and laments the loss of his friend’s sanity and silently, silently, wishes him the best.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, one more chapter and then we're done!


	35. Chapter 35

He is two hundred and thirty-six years old when he finally breaks.

Arkytior has come to him as often as possible, to dry her tears on his sleeves and listen to the stories he tells her, to learn the names of the mountains in the distance and the tales of the stars above their heads, only barely visible through the transduction barriers.

And still--

And still it isn’t enough.

Still she breaks a little more every time he sees her.

Still she returns to the Academy, to the cruelty there, to the cutting words and cold halls and the stares and silences and  _ spite _ that fills the corners.

Still he wishes, a little more every time, that he could save her the way he was unable to save himself.

And so, when she comes to him, and begs him to let her stay, just a night, just a single, solitary night in his spire, he  _ breaks _ .

He’s not forgotten what Koschei did, how he snuck down to the TARDIS graveyards, stole the most recent model dumped there, and fled for the rest of the Universe. It has stuck in his mind like a snatch of song he heard a hundred and more years ago, a breath, a pull, a tug on his heart like only Arkytior has.

A song like  _ love _ . 

And so she begs him, to take her away from the Academy, and he asks her if she wants to leave forever.

“Yes, Grandfather,  _ yes _ ,  ** _please_ ** **, ** I can’t take it anymore--”

He takes her hands and runs with her, on his frail wobbly legs, leaving his headdress and his cane and his robes behind (along with a scribbled apology to Dela on the walls, for the marriage and the leaving and everything, really), and they  _ run _ .

Down through the s pires built to touch the stars and forever barred from them, down through the living streets that run like rivers with robes of all colors, down through the heart and guts and veins of the Capitol, all the way down to the place that TARDISes are left to die, cold and empty and never-loved.

_ She _ is waiting for him.

He has known that she would be since he was eighty-five years old. 

They race up through her doors, laughing, panting, giddy with the thrill of having  _ everything _ , for once, when for all his life he has had nothing. No happiness, no family, no  _ future _ , and how he has all of that and more. 

He sets the coordinates without a care for where they might take him, grins over at Arkytior like he’s fifty again, and pulls the lever down with a  _ clunk _ .

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! This is it! The end!  
I've been writing this story for the better part of three years and it is probably the thing that I am the most proud to have written. Like, ever.   
Seriously, though, people: thank you for sticking with me through all of this. This story means the world to me; I've poured more of my soul into Theta than I have into pretty much any of my other characters.  
Again, thank you so much for reading this story.

**Author's Note:**

> Come visit me at my [tumblr](https://icedragondreams.tumblr.com/), icedragondreams.tumblr.com!  
As always, comments or kudos are more than welcome. Thank you!


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